Winning

Read on 05/23/2005
Jack Welch and Suzi Welch

Jack Welch who has forty years of career at GE and retired as CEO of GE in 2001, has written this book which is both philosophical and practical.The book is divided into three sections. The first section look inside the company - mission and values, the biggest dirty little secrets in Business , leadership, hiring, people management, when to let people go and when to retain them, people acting as change agents in the company and how they can move mountains and crisis management. The second section looks at the competition like strategy, budgeting, Six Sigma when to use it and when not to use it and to what extent to use those statistics .Mergers and Acquisitions deals with some of the pitfalls of mergers and how they are challenging in today's business world. The third section of the book deals with managing your career- right from finding the right job which has some good strategies, getting promoted, hard spots like handling and working under damn boss and balancing the work and life in today's highly competitive business environment. The book is good addition to management bookshelf.

Secrets Of Software Success

By Harward Business School Press

Software Industry is one of the most powerful wealth creators in the history. In this book "Secrets Of Software Success" by Harward Business School Press, based on the survey of more than 100 global software companies, the first panoramic view of the conditions that influence results for both the product and service sides of the sofware industry is presented. The book starts with various software inventions like first patent of clockmaker in 1769, electronic spreadsheet VisiCalc in 1978, Boeing 777 in 1995 (software with wings!), health software like mapping of genetic code in 1990 to gene based medicine in 1997, controlling nuclear plants etc and how these knowledge based businesses created today's wealth and jobs.While the potential of creating wealth and prosperity in the software industry seems boundless, very few remain or even become successfull over time, the author examines various factors like key management strategy, right product at the right time, development processes, tackling of leadership challenges and how the marketing GODS make the software kings. The book goes back to early days in 1949, when Europe and US government gave decisive push to software industry and how globalization took place, the flourishing growth in India and China and how some of the players like IBM,SAP, BAAN, Oracle and Microsoft shaped the software industry. In the Chapter on Winning the war on Software Talent, author describes scarcity of software professionals as the major key challenge of software leaders and various methods to recruit software talent. The book tells about how and why software projects usually fail, the importance of software development methodology and processes and how it helps the quality and productivity.
The chapter on Marketing Gods describes how software product companies build market leadership and how they sustain it once it is achieved and what marketing strategies attackers use to break the market leadership of an established players. The importance of partnering, the nurturing and training your business partners and case study of how it allowed Java to grow quickly and exponentially is described in detail and how the delicate balance between competition and cooperation is achieved in the partner webs.In the landscape of the future author talks about several reasons of U.S.dominance in the software area, the future of fully digitized and one stop solution practices, Componentization and Servicization of products and challenge to the software license based business model.